04/12/2006

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Monday 4 December, 2006

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 04.12.2006

Jochen Jung, long-time head of the Austrian Residenz-Verlag and now director of Jung und Jung publishers, complains that despite the dynamism of the German publishing scene, the major houses look increasingly similar: "Does the Suhrkamp author James Joyce have a different aura than the Diogenes author William Faulkner? One tends to assume that the major publishers all have an individual profile, bearing in mind that Suhrkamp is widely seen as the strict, quasi-religious order, S. Fisher as the house with a solid past, Rowohlt as the company with an international mix of authors, and Hanser as the home of critics' favourites and Nobel Prize winners. Far from it. Not only do all these companies compete for the same titles in New York, London and Zurich. Young German authors, too, seem to fit without difficulty into the programme of any one. Clearly these publishers' identities are based more in the past than in the present."

Frankfurt Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 03.12.2006

Kerstin Holm collects voices on the recent attacks against Russian critics and dissidents. Business journalist and crime writer Julia Latynina doesn't believe Vladimir Putin is behind the recent murders. "The crimes bear the signature of an aggressive faction within the security police, whose goal it is to stop Putin's integration efforts vis-a-vis the West. Russia could turn into a rogue state in the wake of Litvinenko's death. Political regimes are no longer distinguished according to whether they are presidential or parliamentary. Instead, we now distinguish between those that can poison their enemies with Polonium 210, and those that can't." Poet Alina Vituchnovskaya, who was incarcerated several times between 1994 and 1998, sees things even more darkly: "I believe that President Putin, under whose leadership these foul deeds have occurred, deserves special thanks. Because there is a renaissance in Russian literature now that it has regained the right to heroism, prison sentences and death."

Saturday 2 December, 2006

Die Welt 04.12.2006

Mario Vargas Llosa was astounded by the UN report "Beyond scarcity: power, poverty and the global water crisis", which he says should be compulsory reading despite its bureaucratic prose. "When you read the report, the first thing that strikes you is that the flagship of civilisation and progress is not the book, the telephone, the Internet or the atom bomb, but the toilet. Where the human being empties his bowels and bladder, determines whether he has fallen into the barbarity of underdevelopment or is in the ascent. The personal consequences of this simple, transcendental fact are awe-inspiring. One third of the global population Ã¢â¬â around 2.6 billion people Ã¢â¬â has no knowledge of toilets, latrines and cesspits and answers nature's call under trees, by streams and springs or in plastic bags and tin cans. And a further billion uses for drinking, cooking and washing, water that is contaminated by human and animal faeces."

Berliner Zeitung 02.12.2006

Arno Widmann talks with American physicist (and Nobel Prize candidate) Lisa Randall about her theory of gravitation, which can be better explained if you assume the existence of a fifth dimension. However she warns against trying to scale these icy heights with the powers of the human imagination: "We mustn't look. We must think and calculate. In elementary particle physics, as in the physics of the universe, a word, an equation, says more than a thousand images. When the object of our investigation is very small or very large, our imagination leads us into error. The same is even true in our familiar, three-dimensional world. Our imagination doesn't tell us that the earth moves. It says: the sun goes down. I don't know what the extra dimensions are. I don't know what they look like."

Frankfurter Rundschau 02.12.2006

If the ceasefire between the Israelis and Palestinians actually holds, "it could put us on the road to a new start," author Amos Ozwrites hopefully, and finally get a comprehensive bilateral agreement on the table. "What measures would such an agreement entail? Herein lies the hope. Because both the Israelis and the Palestinians know, deep in their hearts, what this agreement would look like and what it would not look like. Even their enemies on both sides basically know what would be written in this agreement and what not. Even those on both sides who would view such an agreement as a catastrophic betrayal know that on the cards are two separate states, Israel and Palestine, divided by the pre-1967 boundary, with a few changes that would have to be agreed on. And there would be two capitals in Jerusalem. And there would be no "right to return" for the Palestinians, and the majority of Israeli settlements would also have to be cleared."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02.12.2006

Weischer 307,200. Weischer 441,600. When Matthias Weischer cropped up in the conversation recently there was no indication that he was a young painter, and one of the most interesting of his generation. It sounded as if Weischer was a stock market company which had just patented a drug against short-sightedness," writes Niklas Maak. "Times have changed. Now the middle-class art collectors in Miami are playing out what they consider to be the 'art lifestyle', drinking the night away, talking, and dancing, while the artists they so adore are living the disciplined and orderely office hours of the classical middle-class citizen. It's impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that between the elated art investor world in New York and Miami and the concentrated, introverted artists in Leipzig's old Baumwollspinnerei."

Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.12.2006

What remains of the myth of the Bauhausschool? asks Gerhard Matzig on the 80th anniversary of the group's move to the city of Dessau. "What Walter Gropius' successor, Hannes Meyer understood as a philanthropic, socially involved formula, (putting the needs of the people before the need for luxury'), mutated either into expensive 'modern classics' or tacky cheapness. It is telling that there is a major DIY chain called Bauhaus. The dictum 'less is more' is particularly appealing to building companies who like to cut out anything that would make a space a space in order to declare the inane result 'modern'. One can say of the legacy of Bauhaus, which was closed by the Dessau city government under the orders of the Nazis in 1932, what they say about concrete in advertising: it's what's you make of it."

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÃÂ ÃÂ about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more